If you have experience or even just an opinion on long dist relationships and teens...

[Chris in VA]

Could we have a discussion by pm?Trying to keep some things private but wanting to discuss. Thanks.

[MysteryJen]

My Dh and started dating in high school. I was a senior and he was a junior. We spent the better part of five years apart, seeing each other on vacations, calling twice a week (long distance charges!), and letters. Things that worked for us: keeping lives separate. He had his life at school and I had mine. Trust was number one, because jealousy is the most destructive. You had to choose to believe that friends were really just friends. Be kind and charitable, you don't want to spend your limited time together fighting.

I have watched adults try to do long distance and it has never worked. In one honest conversation about why, the guy blamed Facebook and social media. He said it always looked like he was having a great time, friends didn't seem to miss her at all, and she got extremely anxious and jealous about his life apart from her which ultimately broke their engagement. I think there is much truth in that.

I would recommend staying off social media and finding low tech ways to stay in touch. Setting up set times to skype, not everyday. Living your life and not his. For Dh and me, long distance taught us really valuable skills that we have drawn on in marriage.

[MysteryJen]

Sorry just saw the by pm part. Let me know, if you want more details.

[MercyA]

I met my husband while we were still in high school. We went to different high schools and then different colleges (until I transferred to his!). I couldn't be more grateful to be married to him. Feel free to PM me if you'd like.

[MrsRobinson]

Adult teens? Dh and I had a long distance relationship right up until we got married. Our 19-21st years. (We're the same age.) Feel free to pm me if you'd like. :)

[alisonf3]

I was in a long distance relationship for two years in my late teens. You are welcome to pm me for details.

[LMV]

Feel free to PM. Our daughter's teen LDR eventually led to an engagement.  To clarify, I am speaking about our DD20 and more than years transpired between the beginning of her teen LDR and the engagement. They are actually still doing the LDR thing for at least another year. He will be starting medical school next month and she is applying to medical school now. She is applying to the medical school he is matriculating at but she isn't sure it would really be a good option for her so we'll see how that goes.

[ktgrok]

My biggest concern is that it is easy to romanticize who someone is when you don't actually see them very often. My ex husband and I were long distance after only being together a few months. Over the summer no less, when there was no stress or pressure or every day life. I think that made it easier for me to miss his mental illness issues, and his laziness for that matter. We only saw each other on weekends and holidays, and it was kind of like a kid only seeing the non custodial parent for fun times, not every day times, does that make sense? I missed a lot partly because I was young, but partly because it is easy to present yourself differently via telephone and email than in real life. 

 

Now, my DH and I met online, and were also long distance, but I was older, and more able to read between the lines. We made a bigger point of talking about every day stuff, not just having fun or talking all romance all the time. Plus I'd done years of marital counseling and knew what I was looking for, etc. I don't know,it was just different. 

 

So in my case, it worked out once, but not the other time. 

[Jennay]

PM me if you still need any input. DH and I had a long distance relationship during college.

[goldberry]

I'm interested also, so please continue to share your experiences!

[Meadowlark]

Well, I met a man online when I was 19 via a chatroom. The relationship became VERY intense and emotional very quickly. He came halfway across the country to visit me for a week, and then that summer I flew there and spent a week with him. It was crazy. We were teenagers in love.

 

Feel free to pm me for more details. There's a lot more to the story-and I would say it's been very complicated even up until today. My general feelings on it are that it's very misleading and SO easy to romanticize the other person to the point that it's not healthy.

[kiwik]

My experience is a long distance romance is nice - all anticipation, treats and fond farewells but you need to be in the same house to discover all the details. I guess if you don't do living together close enough to share daily interactions and ordinary activities would do the job. I didn't marry my long distance guy.

[MomatHWTK]

My teen long distance cheated on me, my early 20's long distance married me. 

[Dmmetler]

I met DH at a summer study program at 16, and for the following 6 years we were long distance. Like FL to NM long distance. Both of us dated other people in that time, which helped-we were the friend on the other end of the phone line to cry over a bad breakup to. In college, when we had more freedom to get together, we decided that maybe this was more than just a friendship, and, over the next three years, spent longer periods of time together (one reason why I had such a good relationship with my MIL until her too early death was that I spent one summer living with DH's mom and sisters and working, while DH lived in the college dorm, so we could have a few months of dating in the same city). We married after I graduated college.

 

I will say that we didn't have unlimited phone service or any of the social media stuff. E-mail only started making inroads when we were in college (DH actually took a UNIX class mostly to get an account-his school didn't automatically give them out. I had one because I was a TA for computer skills classes in the business school). It was less constant contact and more intermittent.

 

We've been married 22 years, so obviously, something worked.

 

I will say that we're both opposed to splitting the family and doing anything long distance for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I had a job offer at one point that would have required doing so until and unless DH could find a job in the same area, and turned it down. DD is considering a school program where many of the kids relocate with one parent, because the school is in a location without a lot of job options. We will only let her apply if DH's company is amenable to him working remotely, because we're not splitting the family across multiple states. When DD and I travel for her snake stuff, DH often, although not always, comes with us and works from the hotel for a few days so we can be together in the evenings. We know we can do long-distance, but because we've done so, we also don't take physical proximity for granted.

[Arctic Bunny]

Well, I met a man online when I was 19 via a chatroom. The relationship became VERY intense and emotional very quickly. He came halfway across the country to visit me for a week, and then that summer I flew there and spent a week with him. It was crazy. We were teenagers in love.

 

Feel free to pm me for more details. There's a lot more to the story-and I would say it's been very complicated even up until today. My general feelings on it are that it's very misleading and SO easy to romanticize the other person to the point that it's not healthy.

I had to read twice to make sure I didn't post this in my sleep! Mine threatened to kill me when I broke up with him, and we lived in different countries. That was interesting...

[KungFuPanda]

I met DH at 18 and married him at 21. In between, we spent two years in a long distance relationship back when you had to buy phone cards and write letters by hand. We've been married 23 years.

[mumto2]

I met DH at a summer study program at 16, and for the following 6 years we were long distance. Like FL to NM long distance. Both of us dated other people in that time, which helped-we were the friend on the other end of the phone line to cry over a bad breakup to. In college, when we had more freedom to get together, we decided that maybe this was more than just a friendship, and, over the next three years, spent longer periods of time together (one reason why I had such a good relationship with my MIL until her too early death was that I spent one summer living with DH's mom and sisters and working, while DH lived in the college dorm, so we could have a few months of dating in the same city). We married after I graduated college.

 

I will say that we didn't have unlimited phone service or any of the social media stuff. E-mail only started making inroads when we were in college (DH actually took a UNIX class mostly to get an account-his school didn't automatically give them out. I had one because I was a TA for computer skills classes in the business school). It was less constant contact and more intermittent.

 

We've been married 22 years, so obviously, something worked.

 

I will say that we're both opposed to splitting the family and doing anything long distance for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I had a job offer at one point that would have required doing so until and unless DH could find a job in the same area, and turned it down. DD is considering a school program where many of the kids relocate with one parent, because the school is in a location without a lot of job options. We will only let her apply if DH's company is amenable to him working remotely, because we're not splitting the family across multiple states. When DD and I travel for her snake stuff, DH often, although not always, comes with us and works from the hotel for a few days so we can be together in the evenings. We know we can do long-distance, but because we've done so, we also don't take physical proximity for granted.

 

Dh and I had a rather similar relationship from age 14 on. We both dated others occasionally. The others (at least my others) hated us. I would honestly say we were just friends as I grabbed my mail from dh from my campus mailbox, then return to the current boyfriend and announce I was going to my brother's (lived near dh parents) for the weekend. Seeing Dh was always my priority. ;) During college we saw each other maybe 4 times a year. Snail mail and maybe a dozen phone calls a year was apparently adequate.

[happypamama]

We had been dating two years when he went away to college, and we did the long distance thing for two years while I finished high school. It was hard. I'm not sure if it was a blessing or not that we didn't have FB, or even email or free cell phone plans. On the one hand, I know that nowadays, DH and I maintain a running text message conversation that helps us keep in touch even on very busy weeks when we barely see each or at home and don't have much time to talk, and that would have been nice when we were apart, to share the little ups and downs and interesting tidbits of something funny a professor said, or just offering encouragement for a busy week or that sort of thing. We wrote actual physical letters and talked for hours about once a week, and so that was nice but not the same as daily interaction. And it was hard not to be there for some of the big events (although he was home in time for my senior prom and graduation, but not my birthday). Otoh, there weren't physical FB posts to show each of us having fun without the other, not staring us in the face. He didn't look at photos of my friends and me and wonder if the guy friend in the photo was a little too close, and I wasn't wondering who that girl in his group project really was. (Which is really cracking me up because neither of us had a lot of friends anyway, and so there really wasn't any other interest in anyone of the opposite sex, but I can see where that would be a problem for some people.). We will have been married eighteen years soon and will have been together a quarter century this fall, and we've faced harder stuff in our marriage than two years apart, but it sure wasn't easy.

 

We did not start the relationship as a LD one, and I think that helped. Two years of dating, even young teen dating, was a good foundation. We already knew it was going somewhere, and those two years apart were always temporary, and shortly into the second year, I got my acceptance letter to his college, so we knew there was an end in sight, and we were able to look forward to that. I think having a teen LD relationship with no obvious end in sight would be so hard, although not unmanageable.

[Starr]

I see now why my mom didn't encourage it. While some work out you also miss out living your age. The lives of high school students and adults in the service are so different. Wishing the best for them and you however it sorts it's self out. 

[Lecka]

I have never dated long-distance for longer than a month or two.

 

But I have been apart from my husband a lot during our marriage.

 

We have had some communication difficulties.

 

Neither of us want the other one to worry, so we don't mention things that would make the other person worry.

 

That is okay while we are apart, but then when we are back together, we have a long process of re-uniting and also getting caught up on each other's lives.

 

The last time we went to marriage counseling and that was totally worth it and very helpful.

 

But we have a family and kids, and our stressors are not the kinds of stressors a young unmarried couple would have.

 

Like -- we have a joint checking account and I pay all the bills for a year while he is gone!

 

I make a lot of decisions wrt the kids that would be much more mutual if he were not gone.

 

But it is worth it, i am happy with what we have.

[lllll]

nm

Edited November 30, 2016 by cathey

[HSMWB]

I met my DH at college. We had a class together one semester. Soon after it started he was dating another girl, so we were just friends. The next summer and following semester I did a study abroad - I came home for about a week in the middle and he and I ran into eachother randomly (he was still dating other girl at this point) but we ended up talking at the library and shared contact into. I left for Europe that fall. During the semester we e-mailed sometimes and he confided that all was not well with his girl friend. But we were really nothing more. I came home right before Christmas, we were able to meet up once for breakfast. He then went to officer basic and I finished at college. That semester things went much deeper, but we were technically just friends, we were able to e-mail ocassionally, write about once a week, and infrequent telephone calls. After graduation (for me from college him for the officer training) he was able to come back for a few weeks before being stationed in Germany. I spent the summer at home and we wrote letters back and forth (he was in the field and didn't have e-mail, and international long distance -yikes) I then moved to Germany in August, we were married in November, and had a big wedding/blessing back in the US the following July. And spent most of the Dec-June in between separated because he was deployed to the Balkans. We have done quite a bit of time apart since then, not what I would recommend, but it is what it is, it worked for us.

Edited July 10, 2016 by HSMWB